McCain’s strategy
Writing by abuhatem on Friday, 24 of October , 2008 at 5:07 pm
McCain is going to lose badly in 11 days. But right now he has improved a lot strategy wise. You just can’t fix a campaign which was schizophrenic from the start with no common theme. Remember how from February to June, McCain was pandering to the right, by August he was attacking Obama as a celebrity and on national security, then three weeks later he picks someone with no national security experience as VP. Sarah Palin is not who brought down McCain, although after she talked to Katie Couric she did shoot herself in the foot to never recover. McCain just never had a cogent, consistent, campaign message.
Either you are a maverick, or a staunch conservative. Not both. McCain also went negative way too late. If you want to swift-boat someone then you start in August. Bush in ‘04 began in August, and so did Bush in ‘88 with the Willie Horton ad. McCain was injured from the start. He was a liberal left-wing republican who couldn’t get the base (which got Bush winning in ‘04), and he was connected to an unpopular administration.
If he could of start over, he should have begun the general by attacking president Bush repeatedly, offering a different vision. Like David Gergen said on CNN last night, he should have ran like Sarkozy did in France while Chirac was unpopular. But you know what, McCain was just a horrible candidate. If the right would have picked anyone else as their candidate, he would already have the right and be able to reach out to the independents.
To win, McCain right now has to keep up a really negative attack ad strategy like he is doing. He has to keep up the Joe the Plumber economic conservatism, but also bring back the discussion to foreign policy so he can taut his bellicose militancy to small town Americans. Right now his campaign is moving more in line with a common message and theme, but its still schizophrenic, and there is no time left. He is doing a good job by moving into Pennsylvania and moving out of Colorado. McCain if he can take PA from Obama and win Ohio still has a fighting chance (but he would still have to win North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, and other swing states).
In the end this campaign is dead, and has been dead from the start. This is just not the year for the GOP. No amount of Karl Rove tactics was going to have McCain win because, to put it bluntly, nobody can get excited about McCain. The left hates McCain because of his foreign policy, the right hates McCain because he has always been a social and economic liberal. McCain is basically a Joe Lieberman democrat, but more centrist on social and economic issues. No matter what he does is he caught in this trap. The only way I could even see McCain getting himself out of this hole is for there to be some kind of international security crisis - such as Russia invading Georgia again or something. But even then, I don’t know. Obama just has so much more money than him, and McCain has absolutely no ground game, no enthusiasm, nothing. In my book its over.
Category: American Politics
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